Success-focused blog Study Hacks notes a study which examined the differences between elite violinists and average players, and found that one of the biggest differences for achievement isn't the amount of time you practice, but how you delegate your time.

Advertisement

The study, published in Psychological Review, took a look at two tiers of violin players (as identified by the school's professors). The elite group didn't spend any more time practicing than the average group, but the elite group did schedule their work very differently, in large chunks of time:

The average players, [researchers] discovered, spread their work throughout the day. A graph included in the paper, which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day, is essentially flat.

The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. When you plot the average time spent working versus the hours of the day for these players, there are two prominent peaks: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

In fact, the more elite the player, the more pronounced the peaks. For the best of the best - the subset of the elites who the professors thought would go on to play in one of Germany's two best professional orchestras - there was essentially no deviation from a rigid two-sessions a day schedule.

This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the players' lives.

Moral of the study: As with working only your "good hours," you might be able to increase how productive, creative, or skilled you are by carefully blocking your time.